Speedrunners

Better late than never, I guess. What am I talking about? Some of you may remember my 7-part-special about speedruns over at GamersGlobal which was published at the end of July 2009. Besides a report and a top10-list, it also featured five interviews with speedrunners and admins from the Speed Demos Archive. Sadly they and most other SDA-visitors had to rely on Google Translate in order to be able to read them. You know, because they were published in German. The results were – well, you’ve probably laughed about the results yourself. So it came to no big surprise for me that there was more than one request for a proper translation:

Of course these aren’t really translations – the German versions are. The English releases above on the other hand are the originals. I fixed some spelling and grammatical errors but otherwise the rest is the uncut version of my questions and their answers in full length without any streamlining or other changes to the content which were needed for the GamersGlobal-release. I did only check before-hand if any of the details had changed but the records and videos are still current. So there was no need for me to intervene here either.

You could ask why it took a year to put these up especially considering they haven’t changed so much from what I had on my HDD all the time. The truth is: I don’t know. I guess laziness was a big factor. But why live in the past? As I said at the start: Better late than never. While the report probably will never see an English translation, at least the far more interesting interviews are finally accessible for our international audience.

I can however tell you that I’m currently working on part 8 to 10 of the special. This time it will all be about Tool-Assisted Speedruns and the corresponding website TASVideos.org. And since I’m already in the middle of conducting the interviews, you can expect the release once again mid to end of July – first in German of course but perhaps this time around it won’t take me a year to publish the originals.

PS: Blur, SBK X: Superbike World Championship (doesn’t look that good but still is the best motorcycle-game out there at the moment) and the very unusual Way of the Samurai 3 (GTA is basically a totally linear experience in comparison) have finally found their way into the MobyGames-database. So go over there and take a look. The Blur-entry is especially interesting as most of the 21 screenshots currently online are from the infamous 4-player-tournament between JakillSlavik, Rondrer, an unimportant third player and myself.